Thug Entrancer: Death After Life (Software, 2014)

Hard-to-define mixture of juke, minimal techno, trap, acid techno, noise, and more. Lots and lots of 808 beats. Active and busy, but sometimes minimal and bassy. Tracks 1-8 are parts 1-8 of “Death After Life”. Part 1 is uptempo juke/trap. Part 2 is slow dubby minimal techno. Part 3 is a long uptempo simmering acid techno jam, which ends with a lazer-like noise jam for the last couple minutes. Part 4 is another slow simmering techno track, which sometimes erupts in flurries of uptempo drum fills. Part 5 achieves the simultaneous feeling of slowly floating (due to the bubbly synths) yet at the same time rocketing forward into hyperspace (with the fast hypnotic beats). Part 6 is midtempo dubby techno with some soft noise smears around the corners. Part 7 starts quiet and unassuming, then kicks into a thin, uptempo techno, with small melodies and lots of handclaps at one point. Part 8 is more beat-heavy, uptempo, kind of hypnotic, but also minimal. The last 2 tracks are 2 parts of “Ready To Live”. Part 1 is another slow, minimal 4/4 techno track, but has one of the more interesting melodies on the album. Part 2 is mysterious midtempo techno, a bit more submerged and crackly than some of the other tracks, and a bit more distant and paranoid. Always amazing stuff from Software, and also I think this guy does web design for Decoder, which I write for sometimes, so that’s awesome too.